"
Imagine the
countryside as a vast
body. Ownership pictures it divided into economic units like internal organs, or like a cow divided into cuts of meat, and certainly such division is one way to
organize a food-producing
landscape, but it doesn't explain why
moors, mountains, and forests should be similarly fenced and divided.
Walking focuses not on the boundary
lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the
paths that function as a kind of
circulatory system connecting the whole
organism.
Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a
mobile,
empty-handed, shareable
experience of the
land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the
boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of
private property."
Rebecca Solnit,
Wanderlust: A History of Walking, NY: Penguin, 2000, page 163.
